Saturday, September 22, 2012

I've been experimenting with searches on
Genealogybank.com, and in an attempt to locate things faster and make new discoveries, in my attempts to find information on C. A. Liddle who worked for the Pullman Car Company, I searched for

last name Liddle
first name Pullman

This works like a proximity search and was faster than messing with the proximity settings and better than a keyword search.

Sunday, September 2, 2012

"Name" searches on sites that search newspapers and other full-text material often really are not just looking for names.

They are looking for the "first name" near the "last name." How near depends upon the site--sometimes users can specify how "close" the "first name" and the "last name" have to be to each other in order to be a match.

Census indexes, marriage indexes and other databases where the information is actually keyed in as a "name" aren't usually set up as proximity searches.